converted particles on top of one another instead of simulation position (warning: contains bacon)
I ended up trying to use hair particles on the container and after a ton of fiddling with the settings, got the bacon on the layout I wanted. things were awkward with the hair particles, as they were displaced on some kind of natural vortex (i say natural because there was no force field applied, and the bacon-hair was growing on a spiral pattern. then i copied one of the sides of the container and applied hair on it, so the sides wouldn't be emitting bacon.
after some more fiddling, i could convert all the particles to meshes. a ton of meshes, btw, 5k+. so i did some cleaning, and some more cleaning, and some more, and was happy with around 600 pieces.
then, i joined 'em all, shrinkwrapped my container on it, gave it some offset, applied the label on a set of the container duplicated faces and voilà!